


when you go, take this heart

by thingsthatgetstuckindrawers



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mostly Pining Though, Pining, Romance, diverges from chapter 697 on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:48:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25419469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingsthatgetstuckindrawers/pseuds/thingsthatgetstuckindrawers
Summary: After the war, Sasuke isn't the one who leaves.Two years later, Naruto returns.
Relationships: Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 14
Kudos: 59





	when you go, take this heart

He was already in love before the end of the war. They had stood across from one another, Sasuke with his Chidori and Naruto with his Rasengan, and Sasuke had felt his heart stutter. To live without Naruto felt like an oxymoron.

And he had powered down his Chidori, let the chakra fizzle and spark and die, had fell to kneel on the water, had only raised his head at Naruto's slow approach. Then Naruto had knelt in front of him, and without words had thrown his arms around Sasuke. Sasuke, body wracked with sobs, had curled a single arm around Naruto and fisted his hand in the fabric of Naruto’s shirt and held him close. And Sasuke had loved him so much it felt like an extra heartbeat pulsing throughout his body, just behind his navel.

But Naruto hadn't known, and Sasuke hadn't said.

And then Naruto had left.

-

Naruto had only taken a week to recover. It was just like him to be bursting at the seams with miracles. But for regular mortals like Sasuke, bruising every inch of his body and using up every ounce of his chakra meant a somewhat longer hospital stay.

Sasuke had passed out from chakra exhaustion halfway from between the Valley of the End and Konoha, and Naruto had carried him the rest of the way until Kakashi and Sakura had met them. Sakura promptly confined them all to the hospital.

When he wakes up, Sakura is standing next to him with a clipboard, muttering to herself.

“Naruto?” He murmurs. The pain medication is already pulling at his mind, asking him to sleep.

“He’s fine, he’s in another wing—you know, just in case you’re looking to beat each other up even more,” scolds Sakura, now fiddling with his IV.

Fleetingly, he thinks, _We’re not supposed to be separated…_ And he passes out again. He dreams of Naruto, of warmth, of lazy evenings after sparring when they can sit at _the_ dock, their dock, and banter, but now free of any actual rancor.

When he next wakes up, he sees the shock of golden hair first. Naruto. Asleep in a folding chair next to his hospital bed, still in papery hospital whites. Sasuke swears he can feel his heart seize.

His branded hand rests close to Sasuke’s, and he wants to hold it. To press the dark crescent on his palm to the pure white sun on Naruto’s. He thinks that if he did, for the first time in a long time he would feel complete. But he also knows Naruto sees him too fully to love him back. And he allows himself to drift off again.

The third time he wakes, Naruto is there. No faint bruising on his arms, no weak chakra signature—just Naruto, looking way too good for having won a war against a literal goddess.

“Naruto?”

“Sasuke! Sasuke!” Sasuke groans, too tired for Naruto’s usual boundless energy. He sees Sakura and Kakashi in the room as well, hanging back from them, watching.

“Teme, I’m all recovered now! And I’ve gotta go, there’s a super-secret important mission I gotta do for Kakashi-sensei. And, well… it’s gonna take a while.” He scratches the back of his head sheepishly. 

“How long?” Is all Sasuke manages to croak out. His throat feels hoarse from disuse. Sitting up takes more effort than it should.

“I don’t know yet…it could be a year, could be more.” And Sasuke feels like his heart is being ground to dust beneath the heel of Sakura’s hospital-sanctioned boots.

Naruto leans in and in what seems to be his version of a whisper, but is honestly way too loud to qualify, conspiratorially tells Sasuke “It’s about Ero-sennin’s information networks. I didn’t know he was training me to know them, but it turns out he was. You can’t tell anyone though.”

Sasuke is about to respond, to scream or rage against the injustice of being separated from Naruto, when Naruto leans back again and smiles widely.

“But I brought you something!”

And he leans over Sasuke and Sasuke feels a weight against his forehead that he hasn’t felt for a long time. Naruto neatly ties a knot behind his head. And Sakura steps forward and silently holds a mirror in front of Sasuke. _His hitai-ate_. Slash and all. He stares at himself—my god, he looks haggard, he looks nearly as bad as he feels—and then whips around to gape at Naruto.

“You kept this?”

“Sure did!” Another wide smile. Sasuke feels as though a dam bursts in his chest, and emotion fills him up, threatening to escape. He opens his mouth, abruptly feels realization strike, and closes it. His veins feel like they are turning to ice.

This is the boy who will break his heart.

_

Naruto departs the next day.

_

When Sasuke is well enough to walk and begin to wield his chakra, a mere month after the war, he is formally arrested and imprisoned, questioned by T&I while his trial rages on somewhere else in the village.

He gets a letter from Naruto every day while he is in prison. His eyes are bound and sealed. So he cannot read them, but Kakashi visits every evening and reads them to him.

Sasuke learns that their mothers were friends, and that Naruto had found this out via meeting Kushina Uzumaki while mastering the Kyuubi’s chakra. He wonders how his own mother would feel about where the two of them are now.

The letters are not long, but are often littered with storage seals, and Kakashi will unseal them right there in his cell, remove the bindings from Sasuke’s arms, and let him hold whatever new tchotchke Naruto has sent. Sometimes he sends food, perfectly preserved in time and often still warm, usually savory sticky buns with unfamiliar local fillings.

He never asks Kakashi to write back.

After six months, Sasuke is released and brought to Kakashi's office.

"You are no longer a prisoner. The Elders of the council are imprisoned for life. You’ve asked to stay and you’re welcome to. But there is now the matter of your reinstatement." His former sensei levels a piercing stare at him.

"How can we trust you again? After all this?" He’s not wrong. Why would Kakashi or anyone else ever have faith in him to be a loyal Konoha shinobi?

"Naruto is coming back, right?"

"He is."

"I," he starts, then stops. "I.....Konoha needs to be safe. So he can come home to it." Sasuke stutters on the word "home." _Come home to me,_ he pleads, in the privacy of his own mind, imagining a sun-warm Naruto loping around the Alliance in his traveling cloak and ridiculous orange clothes.

"Ah." Kakashi looks too knowing. Sasuke forces himself to hold still, even as he wants to squirm.

“I’ll make you a jounin, but I’m not sure that means much when the most powerful shinobi in the world right now is still a genin.”

And so Sasuke is reinstated.

He sends Naruto his first letter, with only a few lines, telling him the good news.

Two long weeks later he gets a six-page explosion of words that Naruto seems to think passes as a letter. Naruto’s sloppy handwriting somehow reminds Sasuke of his chaotic personality, somehow conveys all of his emotions too well. Naruto tells him he’s not a better nin just because Sasuke has surpassed him in rank, tells him he’ll kick his ass when he returns, tells him he’s proud of him. Sasuke reads the letter at a secluded training ground, resting in between his taijutsu katas, and his eyes burn.

_

A year passes in which Sasuke somehow feels both increasingly at loose ends and increasingly like himself.

He trains, he spars with Lee and Kiba and Ino and Sakura, he goes out to dinners afterwards and barely says anything but they seem to accept him anyway. He goes on occasional missions—bodyguarding for royalty, infiltration of crime rings, gathering information on missing nin.

Every two weeks he gets a letter from Naruto. Naruto still cannot reveal where he is, what he’s doing, or when he’ll be back. Sasuke cannot imagine what about his current life is worth telling Naruto—that he sparred with Ino and won? That he ran into Iruka-sensei at the market, and avoided eye contact? That he went to therapy again? That he spent an hour yesterday staring at the clay hawk figurine sitting on his mantle that Naruto had sent him while he was in prison? That half of Konoha reveres him as a war hero and another half think he’s a traitor? So they write about the past.

Sasuke lists his regrets. He always feels raw and reborn after he writes his letters, like the new skin growing to cover a wound. He writes about Itachi, about living in Sound, about how he ended up at the battlefield of the Fourth War. He writes about the first night after he deserted Konoha, and how he missed Naruto but couldn’t admit it to himself. Naruto always, _always_ forgives him, even when he shouldn’t.

Then Naruto tells him about traveling with Jiraiya, about rebuilding in the aftermath of Pein’s attack, about Nagato’s troubled life. Naruto tells him stories the Bijuu tell him, some from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He tells him about the economic and diplomacy textbooks he’s reading while on the road as an ongoing assignment from Kakashi, and how they are actually “super cool” once you get past the flowery language. He tells him that he and Kurama talk all the time, that they are good friends, that he has figured out how to “let Kurama out to play,” whatever that means.

Sasuke knows he cannot ask for more details—if these are intercepted, he cannot risk Naruto being vulnerable.

But he wants to ask for details. He wants to know everything about Naruto, from his grandest plans to his smallest quirks. He wants to know if Naruto likes being on the road. He wants to know if he is content alone, even as Sasuke’s discontent without Naruto froths and churns at the edges of his mind.

He wants to ask if Naruto has found any lovers during his travels—when he left he had been gorgeous enough to make Sasuke bite through his lip if he spent too long thinking about him.

It is not enough, but he makes do.

Most nights in his silent apartment, Sasuke lies in bed and fantasizes about Naruto. Sometimes his fantasies are about Naruto returning and their friendship flourishing, about Naruto's easy acceptance of him. But sometimes they are about how soft his hair is, how his skin would feel under Sasuke’s hands and lips, how worshipping him would feel like becoming instead of submitting.

Afterwards, he always feels ashamed. At best, Naruto sees him as a brother. Most likely, Naruto views him being in Konoha as only a symbol that he is worthy of the Hokage position, and he just hasn't realized this yet. Either way, Sasuke almost killed both of them at the Valley of the End. Sasuke does not deserve him.

_

After just under a year of traveling, Naruto goes to Mount Myoboku.

Kakashi tells him so when he swings by the Hokage Tower to pick up his next letter. There is a frog on Kakashi’s desk, and the sight of it still makes Sasuke’s heart skip a beat.

“The Kyuubi has asked Naruto for a favor first. They’re going to one more location. And then he will spend some months at Mount Myoboku.” Kakashi is straightforward, delivering the news in a bored tone.

Sasuke nods. He _aches,_ sure, but he’s used to it. He thought Naruto would be heading back soon, but what's another few months of misery after a lifetime of it?

As it turns out, it’s a lot. It means monthly letters from Naruto only, and that in itself if enough to make Sasuke spend a week on survival training in the Forest of Death, hoping to forget how he misses his best friend.

And finally, he gets a letter that begins with, “ _One month! Sasuke! One month!_ ” He should feel good. He has been waiting for this. Mostly he feels panic. 

**Author's Note:**

> Love love love comments! 
> 
> This is perhaps out of character. But in my head post-war Sasuke is lost and soft and pining and conflicted and sorta drifting through the days. Like when you're depressed and you keep going for the sake of keeping going.
> 
> Also I haven't really done my research so if there's some in-universe detail that makes no sense lmk
> 
> Chapter 2 needs to be cleaned up but it's written!
> 
> Yes everything is a mitski lyric~


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